As a Project Manager, you may come across long and complex yet identical projects. It takes a long time to create a complex product workflow, marketing campaign, employee onboarding etc. And creating the same content and workflow over and over again is a cumbersome affair and complete wastage of time and resource.

To get away from creating these repeated projects and tasks, we have Project Templates for you.

Project Templates enable you to replicate and reuse the structure and content of existing projects, including milestones and task with start date, end date, estimated hours to speed up new project creation and standardize workflow processes.

The most use cases of Project Template are

Business proposal

Web Development Project Template

App development Project Template

Product Development Workflows

SEO Template

Audit or QA Template

Meeting Agenda

Event Planning

Marketing Campaigns

New Employee Onboarding

Interview Questions

Installation Checklists & so on

How to create custom Project Templates in Orangescrum?

To create a Project Template;

Navigate to left menu panel and click on Template and select Project Template.

Click on Project Template

Define the Project Template’s title; it must be a clear name like we mentioned above; it may be Web Development Plan Template or Marketing Campaign Project Template etc.

To Add Milestone, click on +Add Milestone

Once Milestone title is defined, make sure you have enough information regarding the Milestone in the description. Start Date and End Date of the Milestone can be ignored initially to standardize the template first.

To create a Task under that Milestone, click on +Add Task

Create tasks with proper Description so that anyone receiving this task for the first time will know exactly what to do.

Go through the all the tasks you created and define the Estimated Hour for each task.

If you have a definite duration of each task, then you can define Start Date and End Date. But we always recommend to leave this to define it later.

Assign the task to any of your team member if you already know whom from your team will work on that task.

You can create Tasks without any Milestones as well by clicking on +Add Tasks to Default Milestones

Create as many number of Milestones and Tasks as per your workflow

Note: At any moment, you can edit, delete or update the Project Template.

How to use a Project Template in Orangescrum?

Once a template is created, it can be used by anyone from your team within your project considering they have the access to Project Template.

You can use the Template in two ways;

Add the Template to an existing project

Use the Template to create a new Project

How to add a Template to a Project?

To add a Template to an existing project in Orangescrum,

Navigate to Project Template page

Select the Template to Add to a Project

Click on Add to Project on the Template Card

Once clicked on Add to project, it will prompt a Pop-up, you have all the detail information about the Project Template and all the existing project list on the dropdown option to review

Select the Project from the option list, and click on “Add” button.

Once you add it to a project, all the Milestones and Tasks will be added to your existing project

How to use the Template to create a new Project?

To use a Template to create a new project;

Navigate and click on +New

Click on Project from +New or click on Project from the + icon or from the left menu panel by clicking on New (this is only available for Executive Dashboard Add-on Users)

On the Create New Project pop-up, navigate to Template to add or select the Template from the existing Template as shown in the image below.

Once you create the Project with the Template, all the existing Milestones and Tasks will be added to your projects.

How to create a template from the Project?

To create a template from a project,

Navigate to your project page and click on the select project

You can select the project from the task list page as well

On the Task List page, select the tasks or all tasks and click on the drop down arrow as shown in the screenshot below

Click on “Create Project Template”

Once clicked, it prompts to create a new template or add the tasks to an existing template or milestone.

Click on Select Template and select the Template from the list to add the tasks to an existing Template and click on “Create” to add the tasks to Template.

To create a new Template, scroll down and select the option +Add New Template option and define the Project Title, add Milestones and new tasks if any and click on “Save”

Benefits of using Project Template

The benefits of using Project Templates in Organizations are

Time Savings from repetitive manual work

Create automated project Workflows

Streamline standard practice across organization

Increase Productivity

Save time & Boost Efficiency with Project Templates

Project Templates help you get started with new projects – swiftly and easily. With an already established project structure, your team members will quickly recognize methods, templates and checklists, regardless of which project they are working on.

You can choose from predefined templates for different project management methods, or you can tailor your own.

Tailor-made Templates that works for your Team

If you have set up an effective way of working in one of your existing projects, you can simply copy that structure into a template to reuse in future projects. And if your company uses a specific project model, you can make a template based on those requirements.

Enable your project teams to adapt through organizational learning. The use of project templates is a great way to improve efficiency – by allowing every project team to benefit from your organization’s accumulated project management knowledge.

Your templates can be distributed to colleagues, customers and partners, minimizing the time and energy spent on establishing a shared working method.

Over to you

It’s time to stop spending time on creation of repetitive projects within your organization. Project Templates not only standardize your process but also increases team productivity. Also it brings more clarity to your team on which steps they should take to be successful.

About Orangescrum

As a software development company, we know the pain of managing projects via emails. We wanted a software/tool - to manage projects more efficiently, to have quick communications and to become more productive.